D+C Development and Cooperation (No. 4, July/August 2002, p. 23-25)

Even if Gandhi was less a development theorist than a political activist, it is now becoming clear, more than 50 years after his death, that his thoughts on the development of the Indian village were also of great importance. His idea of decentralised village republics, largely self-sufficient but also networked with each other, and the villages’ own production of goods - in other words, development from below - is highly topical among critics of the modern age in the current debate on globalisation. They see it as a local counter-model.

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born on October 2, 1869 in the small principality of Porbandar, in Gujarat, western India, where his father was Chief Minister. Gandhi’s mother, Putlibai, his father’s fourth wife, was very religious, and her worship of the Hindu god Vishnu and practising of Jainism, an ancient Hindu religion, shaped the fundamental beliefs of her son. These were non-violence, the inviolability of every form of life (ahimsa), vegetarianism, fasting for self-cleansing, and tolerance towards followers of other beliefs and religions.

Having studied law in London (1888-91), Gandhi initially returned to India and established legal practices in Rajkot and Bombay. In 1893, due to only modest professional success he took up the offer of an Indian law firm in the then British Crown Colony of Natal and moved to South Africa, where with brief breaks he stayed until 1914. These two decades moulded Gandhi’s thinking both as a theorist and political activist. He personally experienced the racially motivated discrimination and disadvantaging that were part of the daily life of a non-white in South Africa, but he was no longer prepared to accept them without complaint.

By founding the Natal Indian Congress in 1894, Gandhi was the first to organise the resistance of the Indian immigrants to their denial of the right to vote and other discriminatory laws. As the political leader of the Indian people in South Africa he directed a campaign in Transvaal from 1906 to 1913 to obtain civil rights for the Indian minority.

In his political manifesto ‘Hind Swaraj’ (Free Indian self-government), published in South Africa in 1909, he called on his followers in the sense of satyagraha (devotion to truth) to hold fast to what was known to be true. From this foundation, and with conscious self-control and non-violence, they were to oppose injustice, discrimination and violence. Gandhi later summarised his defining experiences in South Africa in his book ‘Satyagraha in South Africa’, written in 1924.

Leader of India’s
independence movement

Returning to India in 1914, Gandhi rose within a few years to become the outstanding leader of the Indian nationalist movement. In three campaigns of civil disobedience, which each time brought him arrest, conviction and a prison term, he got mass movements underway aimed at persuading the British government to make concessions on the independence issue. The campaigns were designed to stir up self-doubts among the colonial rulers and tear down their moral defence lines.

Between 1920 and 1922, Gandhi propagated asahayoga (non-participation) in the institutions of the British-Indian government, such as public administration and the judicial and education systems. An integral part of these actions were boycotts of British companies and products. At the same time, Gandhi made efforts to promote the country’s small crafts and trades traditions and encourage use of local products, such as the household hand-operated spinning wheel, in a bid to end the people’s dependence on British industrial goods and put economic pressure on the colonial rulers.

After the British government refused to grant India the status of a Dominion, Gandhi in 1930 triggered the second civil disobedience campaign. To protest against the British-Indian government’s monopoly on salt he led hundreds of thousands of people on a long demonstration march to the sea, where salt was traditionally won by evaporation. At the same time, Gandhi successfully resisted British attempts in a planned new Constitution for India to exclude and demote the Untouchables.

The most important phase of Gandhi the theorist and politician of development came in the second half of the 1930s, after he had withdrawn from the Congress Party in 1934 accusing its leaders of betraying his doctrine of non-violence. Gandhi concentrated on nation-building and development "from below". He started a constructive programme to educate rural people, promote small crafts and trades production and appropriate technology, and achieve equality for the disadvantaged and discriminated sections of the population. Gandhi’s economic concepts were greatly inspired by the criticism of capitalism of the British social reformer John Ruskin (1819-1900), whose work ‘Unto This Last’ he had studied in depth while in South Africa. The handloom became the symbol of his campaign against the colonial economy, and Gandhi’s movement deployed it effectively as a non-violent weapon against the dominance of the British textiles manufacturers. Following the outbreak of the Second World War, Gandhi began his third political campaign in 1940, demanding immediate independence for India.

It was one of the greatest disappointments of his life that although due to his activities, in interplay with the changed realities of the postwar period, independence for India had been won, the unity of the sub-continent had been lost. Despite tireless efforts Gandhi was unable to prevent the country’s division in August 1947, to the suffering of millions and at the cost of countless lives, and that Muslim Pakistan came into being alongside India. Only somewhat more than five months later, on January 30, 1948, the Mahatma, India’s ‘Great Soul’, was shot dead in Delhi by Nathuram Godse, a young Hindu fanatic. His own nation still reveres him as its father, but his developmental teachings were long largely renounced in India. Rather, Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of independent India, pushed through a policy of industrial modernisation which set the course for the country’s further development.

The village as the basis
of development

Although Gandhi untiringly wrote, prepared public addresses and corresponded with many people - his collected works encompass more than 90 volumes - much of it was conceived for the political requirements of the situation at the time. In his writings he made scarcely any reference to broader social and political categories. He always focused on the maxims of his own lifestyle and interpersonal relationships. That is why his texts are full of very personal confessions and observations on the behaviour of his fellow human beings, and on the motives for his actions in certain situations. In his autobiography, ‘The Story of My Experiments with Truth’, written at the end of the 1920s, the most intimate searching of his conscience ranges directly alongside his public position. Asked what he had to tell the world, he replied: "My life is my message."

Gandhi personally always attempted to realise his convictions consistently. In the various communities he built up in South Africa and India - the most impressive of which is certainly Sevagram Ashram, India’s ‘secret capital’ - he was at pains to act as a model and enhance his state of knowledge by experiment.

In his aim to free himself and others from thinking under the assumed pressure of reality, theoretical analysis of these pressures was neglected by Gandhi throughout his life. But he showed a remarkable continuity in his basic convictions since the publication of his work ‘Hind Swaraj’ in South Africa in 1909. Time and again, he lashed out at the materialism and colonialism of the West with biting criticism, expressed his reservations about industrialisation and urbanisation, and emphasised instead the value of craftsmanship. He voiced his mistrust of the modern central state, rejected its planned ‘top-down’ development, and called unremittingly for non-violence, village-centred development and the use of appropriate technologies.

Gandhi’s thinking focused on the traditional village community and its self-government. He wrote his main thoughts on that in an article titled ‘Village Swaraj’ (village self-government), which was published in the magazine Harijan in 1942. His texts on the subject were collated by H. M. Vyas after Gandhi’s death in a book with the same title.

Gandhi saw the self-government of the village community as the basis for Indian democracy. "My idea of village swaraj is a complete republic independent of its neighbours for its own vital wants, and yet interdependent for many others in which dependence is a necessity." Gandhi wanted to revive the Panchayati Raj (Rule of the Councils of Five), which were mentioned in ancient Hindu writings. "Every Panchayat will be expected to attend to a) the education of boys and girls in its village, b) its sanitation, c) its medical needs, d) the upkeep and cleanliness of village wells or ponds, e) the uplift of and the daily wants of the so-called untouchables." He said the Panchayat should also serve as a settlement body for local disputes. "That would ensure speedy justice without any expenditure. They would need neither the police nor the military."

At the same time, he did not want to encroach fundamentally upon village ownership structures and production relationships. His concept of land ownership was trusteeship. "The rich man will retain ownership of his wealth, from which he uses what he sensibly claims for his personal needs, and he will act as trustee for the remainder, which is to be used for the society." The guiding principle of Gandhi’s economic ideas was: "The economy that does not know the moral values or ignores them is false."

Starting out from these concepts he fought against both the destruction of village jobs and the replacement of traditionally produced food by industrially processed products which also harmed people’s health. For Gandhi, it was about the empowerment of women, the poor and the untouchables, and overcoming poverty and ignorance as a precondition for also tackling higher political goals with prospects of success. His stand for development "from below", for appropriate technologies, for the right of locally affected people to have a say, and his dictum that on Earth there was "enough for the needs of all, but not for the greed of all" show him to have been a guru of the ecological movement and the ‘sufficiency revolution’.

Like all great thinkers before and after him, Gandhi was not immune to others helping themselves from his extensive works without considering his constantly pursued overall goal of a non-violent society free of social conflicts, made up of self-controlled people who accepted each other as equals. Gandhi probably did not recognise well enough that what he had made a yardstick for his own life on the basis of his experience and knowledge was hardly suitable as a lasting and practical guideline for others. For the masses of the Indian people the modernisation philosophy, as propagated consistently by the Nehru government, obviously had greater appeal.

Gandhi’s legacy: Sarvodaya
and Panchayat

Part of the particularly tragic aspect of Gandhi is that his concepts of help for self-help, rural, village-centred development, and small-scale, locally determined economic development by the people’s own efforts were turned on their head in post-colonial India under Nehru’s modernisation drive. The step-by-step escalation of the dispute between Gandhi and Nehru over India’s path to development and the subsequent alienation of the two political companions of many years is symptomatic of that. While Gandhi argued in vain for frugality and appropriate technologies, the prime minister put his trust entirely in mass production and mass consumption. Thus, Nehru’s motto: "Big is brilliant" and Gandhi’s: "Let us not think of Big Things, but of Good Things" were fundamentally incompatible. As a result, India was and still is equipped with oversized projects and dams for which time and again thousands of local people are displaced and resettled and many villages destroyed.

But Gandhi’s ideas live on, especially since it has become clear that Nehru’s strategy was unable to eliminate poverty in India. The proof of that is above all the Sarvodaya movement, but also the renewed and growing importance in recent years of the concept of Panchayat, local self-government.

Gandhi coined the term Sarvodaya (Welfare for all, or the economic and social development and improvement of a community as a whole) in 1908, when for his compatriots he published a selection of texts from John Ruskin’s ‘Unto This Last’ on the basic principles of political economics. (A version translated into Gujerati by Gandhi himself was published later in India with the title ‘Sarvodaya’.) Gandhi’s explanation of this principle was that everyone should work for the "welfare of all", and that this was at the same time part of the self-realisation of every individual.

The Sarvodaya movement formed under the leadership of Vinoba Bhave after Gandhi’s death with the goal of achieving a redistribution of the soil (Bhoodan) on a voluntary basis. At the same time, Gandhi’s concept of "work for bread" was to be realised by building up village industries. He had written: "The idea is that every healthy person must do enough work for their food and not use their intellectual faculties to ... accumulate a fortune." Village industries and a system of local markets linked with them were so important to him because he recognised that industrialisation along western lines would rob the mass of Indian workers of their livelihoods and increase the country’s oppressive poverty.

The main elements of the Sarvodaya movement are today alive, for instance in the Chipko movement against ongoing forest destruction or in the widespread opposition to the building of the Narmada dams - which for years have been the focus of the environmental policy debate in India. More important than the protests are the ecologically compatible and socially acceptable alternatives which environmental groups are developing, in the Gandhi tradition, to solve the coming problems. The alternatives include village schools, approaches to sustainable farming and forestry, traditional healing methods and decentralised, regenerative energy production. The globally networked opposition to the patenting by a US company of pesticides based on the Indian neem tree (whose leaves act as a natural pesticide), which in May 2000 ended with a victory for the complainants before the European Patent Office, also cited Gandhi’s legacy. They argued that local knowledge based on local conditions and experience cannot simply be expropriated by powerful interests without local people having a say and being compensated.

The recently revived movement calling for the institutionalising of local autonomy is also in the Gandhi tradition. When the Indian Constitution was being written Gandhi managed to have a clause included in Article 40 which says: "The State shall take steps to organise village panchayats and endow them with such powers and authority as may be necessary to enable them to function as units of self-government." Initially, this clause remained largely mere words on paper. The existing panchayats were endowed with little power of decision and few funds. In 1957 the Balwantrai Mehta Committee recommended that the causes of the low effectiveness of the Community Development Programme should be examined and responsibility for the programme transferred to the panchayats. On this basis, Panchayat laws were passed in all Indian federal states by the mid-1960s. In most states, however, the competence of the panchayats in participating in public administration projects is still limited.

But there was a decisive change in April 1993 with the 75th amendment to the Constitution, which markedly upgraded the panchayats at village, county and district level. A sound financing of the councils was ensured for the first time, not only by funds from the Federal and state governments but also by their own tax revenue. The councils must be re-elected every five years, and they can no longer be dismissed by higher authorities. There is a minimum quota for women which applies to the councils and their chairs, and also quotas for people without caste and members of scheduled tribes. This means that decades after Gandhi’s death the Indian villages can finally take their development into their own hands, as he envisaged.

Cord Jakobeit is Professor of Political Science, with focus on international politics, at the University of Hamburg, and Director of the Institute of African Affairs in Hamburg.